New HealthCare.gov CEO named

Kevin Counihan, who led one of the country’s most successful Obamacare exchanges, will take over as CEO of HealthCare.gov before the next insurance sign-up season, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday.

It’s the latest in a series of hires by HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who is bringing in a new management team keen to avoid a repeat of last fall’s disastrous launch of the federal exchange.

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HHS is still looking for a permanent chief technology officer for HealthCare.gov, but the agency announced Tuesday that Tim Hughey of Accenture will effectively fill that role in the interim. Accenture is the lead contractor on the federal exchange now, having replaced CGI, which was fired in January. Hughey will provide technology support to CMS through the next open enrollment season, which kicks off Nov. 15, federal health officials said.

Earlier this month, Burwell announced that Kevin Thurm, a Citigroup executive and deputy HHS secretary in the Clinton administration, would serve as a senior counselor. As she restructured the management team, she also brought on former Wal-Mart executive Leslie Dach in a similar role, and in June she hired Optum’s Andy Slavitt to be principal deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

In a statement, Burwell said Counihan “brings additional operational and technological expertise to the position and will be a clear, single point of contact for streamlined decision-making.”

Counihan will manage the federal exchange and will also coordinate with state marketplaces and oversee the agency’s Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. He will report to CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner. Before running Access Health CT, Counihan was an architect of the Massachusetts exchange that was a model for Obamacare.

Connecticut’s exchange technology worked well enough in its first year that Maryland, which had a disastrous launch of its marketplace and never recovered, has decided to basically graft Connecticut’s IT architecture onto its own.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said Counihan’s appointment was “a ringing endorsement” of the state’s successful implementation of Obamacare. “Since we launched Access Health CT, we’ve cut Connecticut’s uninsured rate in half in this state and nearly 140,000 previously uninsured people now have coverage,” Malloy said in a statement.

Burwell also announced that Lori Lodes, of the Center for American Progress, will be the new director of communication for CMS. She replaces Julie Bataille, who served as the chief spokesman for the agency through the “tech surge” effort last fall to repair the faltering federal exchange website.